Taking place in parallel with a new exhibition of the work of artist
collective Asco - whose name in Spanish refers to disgust, nausea,
revulsion - this two day symposium seeks to explore the meaning of
disgust across a range of practices, including art, literature, film
and popular culture, activism, spatial practice and performance, from
the twentieth century to the present day. Keynotes include: Chon
Noriega (UCLA); Dominic Johnson (QMUL); Katie Jones (Nottingham) and
Imogen Tyler (Lancaster).

The symposium will emphasise how individuals and groups imagined as
objects of disgust may turn that designation back on itself - as a
means to revolt or resist. We are inviting proposals for 20 minute
presentations that focus on cases, contexts or forms of practice
and/or contribute to current articulations of the meaning of disgust -
as emotion, aesthetic, or affect, bound up in social relations or
attendant politics of class, gender, race, and sexuality. We
encourage proposals for papers and alternative presentation forms –
e.g. incorporating aural, visual or performative elements.

Active in East Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, Asco chose a name
that simultaneously described others’ responses to their early work
and their own repugnance towards governmental, military and
art-institutional authorities that at that time treated the Chicano
community with undisguised contempt. At once “attracted to and
appalled by the glitter and gangrene of urban reality,” Asco’s poetics
of disgust move through the warped glamour of self-styled ‘no-movie’
film stills to the creation of faked crime scenes, the appropriation
of a gaping, dripping storm-drain as an ‘asshole mural’, and memorable
uses of the written word.

The parameters suggested by the poetics and politics of Asco and its
context are extended across disciplines and into alternative
geographical and historical domains by invited keynotes spanning
fields of film, media, drama, performance, literature and sociology.
These speakers include:

Chon Noreiga, Professor of Film, Television & Media at UCLA and
Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, is author of
Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema
(2000) and co-author of Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano
Movement (2008) and L.A. Xicano (2011).

Dominic Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Drama at QMUL, is author of
Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture
(2012) and editor of the forthcoming Critical Live Art: Contemporary
Histories of Performance in the UK.

Katie Jones, Lecturer in French at the University of Nottingham, is
author of the forthcoming Representing Repulsion: the aesthetics of
disgust in post-1990 women's writing in French and German, which
focuses on (amongst others) the work of Marie Darrieussecq and
Charlotte Roche.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Disgust as a political stance or strategy;
- Disgust and theatricality;
- Disgust and glamour, camp, or masquerade;
- Cacophony, disgust, and aural experience;
- Disgust, censorship and the definition of obscenity;
- Disgust as a structuring principle, mode of communication or
discourse;
- Theoretical, semiological and sociological models of disgust;
- The linguistics, rhetoric and poetics of disgust.

We encourage submissions from PhD candidates, practitioners, and
academics (from early career to established). Proposals will be
reviewed within an interdisciplinary committee of academics and
practicing artists.

The exhibition ‘Asco, No Movies’ takes place at Nottingham
Contemporary, 12 October 2013 - 5 January 2014.

The Public Programme at Nottingham Contemporary is supported by
Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham.